Stellarino brings Wiring-style coding to the Stellaris Launchpad

[Sultan Qasim] wrote in to tell us about the work he’s been doing on the Stellarino library. It’s goal is to break down the coding barriers present for those looking to move from Arduino to ARM. This is accomplished by facilitating Wiring-stlye code for the Stellaris Launchpad ARM development board.

Right off the bat [Sultan] mentions that the interface is Wiring-like, but is not compatible with it. This means you can’t just plop your existing sketches into a C file and get them to work with the addition of a simple include file. But what it does do is provide access to the functions to which seasoned Arduino users have grown accustomed. You can see some examples above, including analogWrite(), digitalRead(), and a simple delay function.

We had a quick look at the library. It uses StellarisWare components which are stored in the ROM of the chip (these are all preceded by ‘ROM_’). The one thing missing is the UARTstudio library which apparently carries a license incompatible with GPL.

Energia does exist, and a Stellaris Launchpad port is in progress, but it isn’t really ready yet. This is decent as an interim library and it’s also meant to be an adequately easy to follow example for learning StellarisWare. I’ll be releasing an improved version of this library sometime tonight that fixes delayMicroseconds() (it’s timing is wrong in version 0.4) and implements a basic substitute for the UARTstdio library.

It’s meant to be an easy way to throw quick things together without having to worry about the registers. For simpler microcontrollers like the MSP430, manually setting the registers is the way to go.

Yes, there is considerable overhead, and using bitwise operators would make things lighter and faster, and would be better for real production firmware. The Stellaris Launchpad has plenty of speed and flash though, so it works fine even with all the overhead,

I’d also like to get involved in broadening the options for ARM support in the Arduino world.
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We have published a similar version using our version of the gcc tools, that allows the compilation of Sketches (we call it MakeItC). We have this running on LPC1114, LPC175x, LPC176x, LPC2103, LPC2106, LPC2138, LPC2148. And are working on LPC800 now as well

I think the more the merrier, as to what tools are available for people, some like Sketch, some C, some BASIC…